


Though the Stars Walk Backwards

by manybumblebees



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Stargate, M/M, Seemingly Unrequited Pining, Sharing a Body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-13 23:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4542210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manybumblebees/pseuds/manybumblebees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn's been gone eighteen months, and the SGC have all but stopped looking for him.</p><p>One day, if Louis is very, very lucky, he’ll find a quantum mirror that’ll transport him to an alternate reality where he can call his commanding officer an idiot without losing his job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Though the Stars Walk Backwards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [imitation_red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imitation_red/gifts).



Louis is seated at the important end of a long banquet table in the viceroy’s palace on PXT-182, listening to Harry drone on about earth’s religious holidays and the calculation of the date of Easter. It’s a perfectly nice banquet, aside from all that, though as with most of the food he eats off-world, Louis makes sure not to ask what kind of animal this meat was before it was battered and fried. 

“Tastes like chicken,” he says to no one in particular, but he’s ignored, because for some reason people are actually listening to Harry tell them about the Pope.

Louis tries hard not to roll his eyes and he doesn’t quite manage. He turns to his right to make a face at Zayn, but instead of Zayn, he finds the viceroy’s brother. He makes the face anyway. The viceroy’s brother looks at Louis like he’s even stranger than he’d expect an explorer from another planet to be. Louis means to ask him if being the viceroy’s brother makes him the vice-viceroy, but now he’s distracted by how much it sucks that it’s not Zayn sitting next to him, and it’s putting him off this nice banquet a bit.

It’s been eighteen months, and Louis still isn’t used to it. That rubbish people say about time and wounds healing is just that: rubbish. Every time they gather in the gate room to leave for a mission, it still takes Louis a second to remember that there’s four of them now, and that’s it, Zayn didn’t fall asleep in the dorms or get sidetracked arguing about hieroglyphs with Jackson, he just isn’t coming, because he’s gone.

Having a team of four is much less of a headache when it comes to requisitions, it’s easier when they need to split up – Louis and Liam take a scientist each – and it came in extremely handy on P1D-784, where the natives inexplicably required them to take part in a ceremonial couples dance, but Louis hates it, and the first arsehole to tell him it’s probably better this way, you know, _for the team_ , gets his head shoved into a closing wormhole.

“Did you know the Catholic liturgical calendar is divided into moveable feasts and fixed feasts?” says Harry, who has a habit of prefacing tidbits of earth knowledge with “Did you know,” even when talking to people who’d never heard of earth before the four of them came tumbling through that dusty old ring in the ruined temple that the locals had no idea was a portal to other worlds.

“Did you know there used to be five of us?” Louis says to the viceroy’s brother, loudly enough that he knows Harry can hear him.

Across the table, Niall lets his fork clatter onto his plate. He looks like he’s trying to signal morse with his eyebrows – first at Louis, then, when Louis ignores him, at Harry, who is far too busy explaining the concept of hagiographies to a minor magistrate to pay any attention to him.

“On your world?” says the viceroy’s brother politely, if obliviously.

“No, on our team. We’re down one. Haven’t seen him in a while. He’s about this tall,” Louis holds his hand out to the side at around Zayn-height. “Brown eyes, very shiny hair.”

There is a racket to Louis’ left – some startled gasps followed by the familiar sound of Liam apologising profusely. 

“Terribly sorry,” he says. “Oh no, not the tablecloth.”

He’s toppled over a large pitcher of palm wine. In Liam’s position, Louis would be more worried about the expensive-looking dresses the gasping ladies have on than about the tablecloth, but it’s chaos regardless, and the viceroy’s brother turns his attention away from Louis and towards an unfortunate cup bearer, who is shouted at to clean up the mess. Just as Liam intended, probably, minus the shouting.

After dinner, as they’re trekking back to the gate for their scheduled check-in, Liam hovers at Louis’ shoulder, close enough that it makes Louis tense. He clearly wants to say something, but he’s waiting until they’re out of earshot of the locals. Louis wishes he’d get it over with already, though he doesn’t particularly want to hear whatever it is Liam has to say, and besides, he can probably guess.

“Might want to lay off the ceremonial wine, mate,” Liam says, right on cue, as they pass through the city gates.

“That’s Lieutenant Mate to you, Corporal,” says Louis.

It’s pointless to pull rank on Liam; he’s always going to try to take care of everyone, and Louis normally doesn’t care, but he’s cranky, so he does.

It takes Liam a second to respond, as if he’s observing a moment of silence for Louis’ shitty mood. When he opens his mouth again, his voice is carefully gentle.

“We don’t know these people, Lieutenant. Doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

“Noted.”

Louis doesn’t say anything else as Liam’s setting up the radio link. He’s tired of having the same argument about bringing up Zayn when they’re off-world.

“I miss him too,” Liam says quietly, reaching to touch Louis’ arm before he hands him the radio.

Carter’s voice crackles over the radio long before Louis is ready for her.

*

They’d had to break Liam in when he first joined the team. He’d come fresh from basic training, awkward and jumpy every time someone got into his space, holding himself stiffly in his own little bubble like they teach you at the academy. It had taken six months for him to stop replying “Yes, sir” to everything Louis said to him, to stop standing at attention.

Louis’ favourite thing about off-world missions is being half a galaxy away from the SGC and their idea of how to run a gate team. The most valuable skill he picks up from their endless briefings about maintaining a stable command structure is how to fold SGC memos into the perfect paper airplane.

Guys like Lorne and Sheppard complain endlessly about the civilians on their teams, how they don’t follow orders and they’re a liability in the field, and they childishly sit apart from them in the mess hall at Cheyenne like they’re still in school. Louis sits with his team, and spends most meals trying to flick peas into Liam’s hair.

Louis enlisted at eighteen, but he’s never been particularly good at being in the military. The testosterone alpha-male shit doesn’t come naturally to him, if it comes to him at all. He can fake it when he needs to, but he’s always preferred being liked to being feared, and that’s how he runs his team. Or maybe that’s just what he tells himself so he has an excuse to goof off, to jump on Niall’s back and piggy-back ride him to the gate, or to let Zayn use him as a pillow as they sit down to their rehydrated dinner at camp.

Liam doesn’t wrap around him in his sleep the way Zayn did when they shared a tent, but he lets Louis press close enough to feel his body heat through their sleeping bags.

*

Zayn first mentions leaving near the end of a long stint on P5R-058, where they’ve gotten horribly sidetracked from their mission brief because the locals decided they didn’t want to give the strangers who had come through the ring of the ancestors access to their collection of ancient scrolls after all, like they’d agreed, and on second thought they also can’t risk letting these strangers leave.

Even Harry can’t charm them into changing their minds. At one point the chieftain had heavily hinted that if one of them, say, the tall, strapping one for instance, were to marry his daughter, that would be enough of a guarantee that they wouldn’t sell their planet’s coordinates to the Goa’uld. Liam had looked like he was honestly considering this as an option before Louis shut it down.

It’s been a long day, and Louis is tired. He should turn in, like everyone but Zayn has already done, but if he goes to sleep it’ll be morning again, and he’ll have to spend another day pointlessly trying to prove that they’re trustworthy. It’s going to come down to a bribe; it usually does. Louis is just waiting for them to ask for something he can give them.

“Do you ever get tired of this shit?” says Zayn, scrubbing a hand across his face as if to wipe away the frustration etched there. His notebook is open on his lap, but he’s been staring absently into the fire for a while. It’s like this a lot, the two of them the last ones up, just them and the fire and Niall softly snoring in the background.

“All the time,” says Louis.

“D’you ever think about doing something else?”

“Like what?” says Louis. He gets to travel to other planets with his four best friends, and yeah, sometimes it sucks, like now, and the paperwork is a nightmare, but it’s still the most fun Louis has ever had and he’s getting paid for it.

“I’m not good at anything else,” Louis says.  
Zayn looks down, his hair falling into his eyes. He fiddles with the strap of his notebook.

“What if something like this happens and I miss my wedding?”

“Pick another date. Perrie will understand.”

“Won’t be much of a husband if I’m never around,” Zayn says quietly. “Or a father.”

Louis should have been expecting this, but it takes him by surprise, and he struggles to keep from showing everything on his face, hoping it’s dark enough that Zayn can’t see the rush of panic.

“So what?” he says. “You’re not military. If you wanna leave, leave,”

It comes out harsher than he expects, his voice high and shrill. Louis wants to get up, walk around, kick something, but he makes himself stay right where he is, tension vibrating in his body.

Zayn looks at him like he’s stupid.

“Like they’ll just let me walk away?”

“They let O’Neill retire,” Louis counters. “ _Twice_.”

“I’m not him,” says Zayn.

Louis pokes at the fire with the barrel of his rifle instead of answering. If he digs deep he can probably come up with a few good reasons why the SGC would be happy to let Zayn go – it’s not like their team has a spotless record, or anything. He just can’t bring himself to talk Zayn into leaving. He shouldn’t have to. He thought they were a team, but it turns out all this time Zayn didn’t want to be here. Louis doesn’t want to be here either, he hates this fucking planet and this mission is a wash, but Zayn wants to leave and not come back, to stay on earth and be millions of light years from Louis and the lads.

“Do you not– did you–” Louis tries, but the words stick in his throat. “Forget it,” he says, and then, all in a rush, “Do you hate it that much?”

“Hey,” Zayn says, impossibly gently. “No, I love this. I love you guys. It’s just not everything to me, you know?”

Louis says nothing. It is everything to him, that’s the thing. It’s pathetic, but it’s true. He misses his family when he’s off-world, but after a few days he always gets that itch, and he can’t wait to step through the gate again. There’s nothing else he’d rather be doing, and he’ll keep doing it as long as the SGC will put up with him.

Maybe it’s good that Zayn’s going, Louis thinks. Just so Louis won’t spend entire evenings contemplating the lushness of his eyelashes in the firelight, or hoping for some kind of alien marriage ritual that is absolutely essential to the completion of their mission. He’s read about the quantum mirrors SG-1 found on a few of their missions, and Louis thinks about that a lot, about stepping into a world where everything is just slightly different, where Zayn is slightly less engaged to Perrie and slightly more in love with Louis.

It’s unprofessional, probably, to be infatuated with one of his team members. Louis wouldn’t say it’s keeping him from doing his job, because most days his job is to stand around with a weapon in his hands and wait for Zayn or Harry or Niall to finish their sciency stuff. None of them really need babysitting, except that Zayn does, because he’s not usually very aware of what’s going on around him as soon as he gets near some alien artifact. Though when he’s ambushed, it’s usually by curious local children rather than hostile forces. Part of Louis’ job is to distract the adorable alien children with Dairy Milk bars he keeps in a pocket of his tac vest just for this purpose. Earth’s finest.

He can probably stop doing that, now.

“I’m going to bed,” Louis says abruptly, and walks away without another word. He kicks off his boots and zips himself into his sleeping bag and tries to will himself to go to sleep. He’s still awake when Zayn shuffles in with a rustle of fabric and the whine of zippers. They each stay on their own side of the tent.

The chieftain lets them go the next day, in exchange for a crate of weapons.

 

*

“What happened on M2X-812?” Carter asks during the first of many debriefings. She’ll ask that same question again, and again, though Louis’ answer never changes. 

If it hadn't been for Carter ordering his team back to earth for her investigation, Louis would still be out there looking. He'd spent two weeks looking and it turned up nothing, not a single footprint or a shiny dark hair or anyone who’d remembered seeing Zayn, and it was still more useful than being interrogated by the brass like Louis is an accomplice, like they'd set it up together as some kind of elaborate hoax, or the world’s worst attempt at treason. Zayn’s an art historian, he doesn’t know any state secrets, and even if he did he wouldn’t sell them to the Goa’uld for money or galactic domination or whatever, because he doesn’t care about any of that, which Carter would know if she’d ever spent even five minutes with him. She hasn’t, and she probably still wouldn’t know his name if he hadn’t disappeared off-world and made things awkward for the SGC.

No one at the SGC seems willing to believe the simplest, most likely explanation for what happened on M2X-812, which is that Louis fucked up. It's his fault, and if they're going to strip his rank or suspend him he wishes they'd do it already. Though suspension means he wouldn’t get to go off-world, and he’d have to leave the search in the hands of the SGC, which is as good as giving up.

*

M2X-812 is a routine mission. The moon is of no strategic importance, which is why they have the honour of receiving their house calls from SG-11, rather than one of the sexier gate teams. They’ve been here half a dozen times before, trading medical supplies for access to their technology, libraries, and the enormous botanical gardens Louis has to physically drag Niall out of when it’s time to head back to the gate. It’s all rocks and dust except for a single broad river, on the banks of which the city of Theremus is spread out, vast and ancient and entirely isolated. The Goa’uld have never been there, as far as Harry can tell from their records, and their gate had been sitting in the basement of a museum before their team came through it. 

Zayn spends their first few visits in Theremus’ museums, walking around with a face like Christmas morning. Louis isn’t much of a museum person, though he’s seen his share of them since being teamed up with Zayn, and when filtered through Zayn’s excitement, he doesn’t mind them. Zayn sits for hours quietly sketching the statues and paintings, scribbling notes in the margins of his sketchbook that he’ll turn into a brilliant paper on art movements in ancient Theremus which he’ll never be able to publish, and which Louis will never be able to understand. 

Eventually, one of the museum curators points out the River Temple to him, built on an island splitting the river in two, and packed floor-to-ceiling with carvings, some of which the curator says have stumped the finest minds of Theremus for centuries.

“Alright,” Louis says before Zayn even finishes opening his mouth to ask. At this rate he’ll be lucky if they make it back to earth within twelve hours of their scheduled gate time.

The temple is incredible, even to Louis’ untrained eye. When the curator brought up the floor-to-ceiling carvings, he’d neglected to mention that the ceilings are so high that you can barely see the carvings at the top of the walls, where they curve away into an immense dome. Huge pillars supporting the roof are covered in peeling gold-leaf and centuries of dust, disturbed only by the occasional handprint of one of the finest minds of Theremus.

Louis trails after Zayn as he explores the main room, explaining a few hieroglyphs to Louis, who dutifully pretends to be interested and even leans in to peer at a few carvings. Zayn lingers over a sequence of images of little stone people worshipping what looks like a weird lizard, though Zayn insists it’s a crocodile.

“Should get Harry to check for lore on the crocodile stuff,” Louis suggests.

He hasn’t seen a single crocodile in all his time here, but this temple is much older than the city that’s been built around it, so it’s possible they’ve gone extinct. Maybe the little stone people didn’t worship them hard enough.

Zayn barely acknowledges him, which Louis has learned not to take personally. He just gets focussed, that’s all. One time Louis actually landed a paper airplane in Zayn’s hair, in a temple not unlike this one, and it had taken Zayn ten minutes to notice. Louis sits down on a crumbled rock and checks his watch. They’re scheduled to return in four hours, and knowing Zayn he’ll be sketching for at least four hours and twenty minutes before Louis is able to convince him to leave. He leans back and closes his eyes and prepares to take a little power nap.

Strangely, that isn’t the part that makes Carter’s jaw clench every time he repeats his version of events. That part comes next, after Louis is woken up by his radio crackling to life, and Liam saying, “Lieutenant, we’ve a bit of a … situation here.”

He sounds weirded out enough that even Zayn takes notice, looking over his shoulder as Louis scrambles for his radio. 

“What’s wrong, Payno?”

“Nialler’s… stuck.”

“Stuck how?”

“One of the plants trapped him. He says it might be carnivorous. It’s some kind of vine thing.”

“Have you tried shooting it?”

“Niall says not to,” Liam says ruefully. “He’s worried I’ll only make it angry.”

“Okay,” says Louis. He looks over at Zayn and his pile of sketches and scribbles.

“I’m fine,” Zayn says. “Go.”

*

The part that really pisses the SGC off is that instead of risking Niall being eaten alive by a plant, Louis had opted to leave Zayn alone in a temple on an uninhabited island completely cut off from the mainland, on a world where no one, in two years of scheduled visits, had so much as given them a foul look.

“This simply would not have happened if you’d followed protocol,” says one of Carter’s lackeys. It’s hard to tell them apart – they all look kind of similar: square jaw, throbbing forehead vein, convinced either Louis or Zayn will be the undoing of humanity. This is the third time Louis has been interrogated – sorry, _interviewed_ – and to her credit, Carter has yet to give him shit for playing it loose with standard operating procedure. She’s spent enough time in the field to know that shit happens, and then you have to deal with it. Sometimes Louis even believes she cares more about finding Zayn than she does about blaming Louis for his disappearance, which is more than he can say for certain other SGC officers.

“If I’d followed protocol, my botanist would still be stuck in a web of flesh-eating vines, and you’d be chewing me out for _that_ ,” Louis tells the lackey.

He pictures steam coming out of the guy’s ears. “You don’t leave civilians by themselves when you’re off-world!”

“That’s enough, Captain,” says Carter, at the same time as Louis says “Have you ever even _been_ off-world?”

*

After Louis cuts Niall down from his vine trap, he stops by the university, where he has to tell Harry off for chatting up the librarian, which is why, when he returns to the River Temple to find Zayn gone, he’s exasperated more than worried. Maybe he should have become an actual nursery school teacher – it’d be just as frustrating, with nearly none of the interstellar jetlag, and he’d never get shot at or have to write mission reports.

His voice bounces off the domed ceiling when he calls out Zayn’s name. He checks a side room, which leads to another side room, and he passes from room to room until he eventually circles back to the main hall. No Zayn. His sketchbook and pencil lie on an altar near the carving of the little crocodile people.

“Zayn,” Louis calls sharply. He’s starting to get a bad feeling about this. “This isn’t funny.”

He radios the rest of the lads, talks to the curator, tries every museum and temple in the city. He goes back to the island with Liam and combs it, and they find nothing. They’re all tense and worried as they go back through the gate, but it’s not until they’re in the mountain and Zayn hasn’t turned up there, either, that Louis panics.

*

Louis isn’t stupid, he knows disappearing on an off-world mission is bad news. It’s the kind of news that turns into a body bag being carried back to the gate, if they even find a body. Of course, it isn’t all bad. There was that one time Niall was captured on a mission and SG-2 found him a month later, the smiling and benevolent ruler of a small garden world. If it wasn’t for his contract, he might not have come back at all.

Sometimes people just take off. They find some pre-industrial hippie paradise tucked in a quiet corner of the galaxy the Goa’uld don’t bother with, and they decide to start over, live in a treehouse, never worry about their phone bill again. That’s what the SGC believes happened to Zayn, and they want Louis to admit it, to tell them he knew about it so they can stop spending their time and money looking for him. They’d questioned the other lads, too, but they keep coming back to Louis, like they’re smelling blood. Did Zayn ever show any undue interest in the Goa’uld? Did his behaviour change recently? Was he critical of the SGC? Was he happy at home?

Louis chews the inside of his cheek and says nothing, he shrugs, he glares. They ask him again. Louis says that Zayn wouldn’t take off like that; he knows him. Zayn wouldn’t leave his team, and he definitely wouldn’t leave Perrie.

A week passes like this, then two, until Carter finally leans forward in her chair like a threat.

“There’s something else, and you’re going to tell me what it is.”

Louis thinks about the shadows flickering across Zayn’s face in the firelight, Zayn’s long fingers fussing with a loose thread on his sleeve, and his mouth goes dry, and he knows she has him. She knows it too.

“He said something about retiring,” he admits, and it feels like stabbing Zayn in the back, telling her something Zayn told him in the softest voice late at night, something he didn’t even want to tell the other lads.

“He wanted to start a family,” Louis says, and he thinks he might throw up.

“And he felt he couldn’t do that while he was part of the Stargate programme?”

Louis just looks at her.

He’s been deployed overseas before, gone nine months the last time. It still isn’t anything like being part of a gate team, coming home from a long mission and feeling slightly off, like the gravity isn’t quite right, or he got used to sleeping through the hazy red nights of a binary star system. Even talking to people is weird without the gate translating for him, he stumbles over his words sometimes.

Every time he comes back, his sisters and his little brother seem taller, older, grown past the few weeks or months he’d been away, like time doesn’t work quite the same on this end of the galaxy. Louis can’t imagine what it’d be like if it was his own kid, what it’d be like to miss out on so much, to always have to leave.

It isn’t just that, either, it’s not being able to talk about anything he does while he’s away, because everything is classified from now until the end of time, on pains of a death carefully orchestrated to look accidental, so he’s always either lying to his family or carefully keeping quiet. It’s exhausting. It’s partly why he likes being off-world more than he likes being home, most times.

“No,” he tells Carter, after she lets the silence stretch on and on. 

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” says Carter. “That will be all.”

And so the SGC, with their impeccable gift for missing the point entirely, believe Zayn skipped out on his team and his life to make space babies with the first available alien princess. They don’t stop looking, officially, and his file is dutifully stamped “M.I.A.”, but they stop sending out search parties, and they reassign his office to a squirrely geologist who Louis decides to hate on principle.

One day, if Louis is very, very lucky, he’ll find a quantum mirror that’ll transport him to an alternate reality where he can call his commanding officer an idiot without losing his job.

*

They’re cleared to go off-world again, but Louis isn’t naive enough to believe that means Carter trusts him. Their missions are somehow even less interesting than before: supply runs; supervising digs; the banquet, which is nice and all, but really just boils down to spending hours upon hours making small talk with people they have nothing in common with except that they both breathe oxygen.

They don’t go back to Theremus. Rumour on base is that someone leveraged the risk inherent in sending teams there – just look at what happened to SG-11! – to pressure the magistrates into giving them a cushier trade deal, but it’s part of SG-9’s roster now, and getting angry about it won’t change anything, Louis tells himself before he punches his locker and bruises the shit out of his hand.

With Zayn gone, fewer of their missions are to densely populated worlds, and more of them are the three-huts-and-a-Stargate type that have Harry sit in cross-legged conference with the village leader while Niall wanders off into a field to inspect the crops. Niall gets to go out and play more, now, and he spends less time hanging around watching Harry and Zayn work while casting longing glances at people’s well-tended backyards.

Louis misses the well-tended backyards a bit. He misses the cool, roomy temples where Zayn would sit and sketch, and he misses having nothing better to do than to hang out with Zayn and make sure he didn’t get mobbed. Niall makes him do stuff, and Louis is just not the type of person who enjoys being ankle-deep in mud because it is _vitally_ important to get a sample of this alien root vegetable, which, by the way, has tiny invisible prickly hairs all over it, which are now all over Louis, instead.

“I hate plants,” he tells Niall.

“The feeling is clearly mutual, my friend,” Niall says cheerily. Of course he’s taking the plant’s side.

Niall bags and labels the space potato and scampers off to the next field with Louis on his heels, still picking the little plant quills out of his hands.

“Shit,” says Niall, and stops abruptly. Louis isn’t looking and slams into him, almost toppling them both over.

“Watch it,” Louis says, and then “Oh,” as he spots what made Niall stop in the first place. “Fuck.”

“SURRENDER!” thunders the largest of the Jaffa. There’s three of them, wearing helmets shaped like crocodiles and pointing their staff weapons at Louis and Niall. Louis briefly considers using the P90 he’s been carrying around more or less for decoration for the past five years, but they’re outnumbered, and while Niall’s technically military, it’s pretty much a formality. Louis sighs and raises his hands. Out of the corner of his eyes, he can see Niall do the same, though he doesn’t drop the sample bag.

“Where is your leader?”

“Uh, right here, mate,” says Louis, and he points to himself with his thumbs without lowering his hands. The Jaffa look at each other as if trying to decide whether to believe him. Louis swears he sees one of them shrug.

“Awkward,” Niall says under his breath.

“SEIZE HIM!” the Jaffa shouts, having apparently decided that Louis is legit. His two henchmen rush towards him and grab him.

“Fellas, I think you may have made a slight error,” says Louis. “See, last time someone from my team went missing my people barely even searched for him. I’m not important! They might not look for me at all! You might even be doing them a favour!”

Louis is aware that he’s babbling, and that he sounds faintly hysterical, and it quickly becomes apparent that the Jaffa don’t care. They grab him under the arms and throw him ungently into the back of their ship. Louis twists around so he can look back at where Niall is, standing there with his botanical samples as the last Jaffa backs away from him towards the ship.

“Niall!” Louis shouts, and then he can’t think of anything to add. _Tell Carter this wasn’t my idea_? One of the Jaffa points his staff at Louis’ chest, which would be enough to shut him up, regardless, then they close the hatch and the ship takes off bumpily.

*

They take away Louis’ weapons and put a pair of shiny, bejeweled handcuffs on him before they lead him into the throne room – though “lead” is a strong word, seeing as how Louis’ feet barely touch the ground the whole time.

It’s a long way up to the throne, which is even shinier and more bejeweled than Louis’ cuffs. When the Jaffa deposit him in front of it, Louis loses his balance and stumbles to his knees, which makes the angle even more dramatic when the figure on the throne rises with a flourish.

Louis isn’t even all that shocked, if he’s honest; the crocodile helmets were a dead giveaway. He’s kind of thick but even he could put that one together.

He’s never found Zayn particularly imposing, unless there’s such a thing as being intimidatingly fit, but the angle works for him, makes him look all tall and looming. The cut of his cheekbones seems sharper, though it might just be the buzzed hair that makes his face look more severe. His hair is dyed green, and a stud sparkles in his nose. It should look ridiculous, but it’s Zayn, so he’s carrying it off.

“Alright, mate?” Louis says. “Love the hair.”

That gets him a smack in the ribs from the butt end of a guard’s staff.

"Speak when spoken to,” the guard booms from under his crocodile helmet.

Zayn holds up a hand in a benevolent, king-like sort of way. Except it’s not Zayn, of course. It’s whatever Goa’uld is inside him, making his eyes glow. Louis tries desperately to think of a Goa’uld with a fondness for crocodiles, but he’s drawing a blank.

“Leave us,” not-Zayn says, in that warbly Goa’uld voice like he’s talking into a tin can, and the Jaffa file noisily out of the throne room.

His robes billow when he descends the steps down to where Louis is. They’re an elaborate red and gold affair that he somehow manages to pull off despite his green hair. Power of being Zayn, or, looking like Zayn. If Louis had to choose a body to inhabit for the next millennium, he’d probably choose Zayn too. Is that weird? Probably, but what isn’t right now. He’s in the throne room of a Goa’uld pyramid ship looking up at Zayn, or not-Zayn, who is smirking at him like this has all worked out just as he planned. 

Cocky move telling the guards to leave, Louis thinks, but then again, he’s cuffed and unarmed, and even if he weren’t, what’s he going to do, shoot Zayn?

“At last, we meet,” the Goa’uld says. Someone should really tweak the gate translation mechanism so these guys don’t sound like they just stepped out of a bad regency novel, Louis thinks. He’d always assumed it was just Jackson’s writing style that made them sound so pompous in the mission reports, but it turns out they actually do talk like that.

“Yeah, hi. Who are you?” 

“I am Sobek,” says the Goa’uld. “And you are Louis. My host thinks highly of you.”

“Yeah, well,” Louis starts. He wants to say something sarcastic, but he ends up saying, “That’s nice,” in a sulky tone.

“Your friend makes a fine host,” Sobek purrs. “I waited for one like him for centuries.”

Louis twists in the cuffs. “I don’t suppose you’ll let him go if I ask nicely?”

There’s something to be said for the acoustics on these ships; the Goa’uld’s laughter rings around the throne room clear as a bell.

“I didn’t think so.”

Louis’ cuffs are pretty heavy. If he times it well, he can lunge up and smack Sobek over the head with them, maybe knock him out. But then what would he do? The guards are still outside, and Louis would never get off the ship, or he’d have to leave Zayn behind, which kind of defeats the purpose of finally having found him.

“I am sure you would like to know why I had you brought here,” says Sobek. It’s weird how little he actually looks like Zayn. It’s not the hair, or anything, it’s something in how he carries himself, how hard the lines of his face are, where Zayn’s is all soft and kind. He’s like Zayn’s evil twin.

“Yeah, alright,” Louis says. 

“Unfortunately, that will have to wait.” Sobek snaps his fingers, and the Jaffa trudge back into the room. “For now, you may rest.”

“O-kay?” says Louis, more confused than ever.

Sobek sinks down on his throne, face inscrutable as he watches Louis being carried away by his guards.

*

They toss him in a cell. Louis hasn’t been in one of these before, but he’s read enough of SG-1’s mission reports that the weird angles and the orange glow to everything seem oddly familiar. They give him food and water and they don’t even torture him. As far as being held prisoner by earth’s number one enemy goes, it’s not so bad. He stretches out on his bunk and thinks, _Zayn’s alive_. Zayn’s alive and Louis knows where he is. He grins to himself and tries to hold on to the little ripples of relief, and not think about how Zayn’s host to a Goa’uld, and Louis is locked up, and there’s a million guards everywhere and he doesn’t actually know where he is in the galaxy. He’s spent eighteen months trying to find Zayn, and he found him. All he has to do now is get him home.

He hasn’t been asleep for long when he wakes up to a loud clatter of armour, the sound of a dozen guards rising suddenly to attention. He can hear Sobek speak to them quietly, and the rattle of keys.

Louis is up and standing by the bars of his cell by the time Sobek reaches him. He’s alone, and he smiles at Louis as he slides the key into the lock and turns it. He motions for Louis to follow him, but he doesn’t cuff him or beckon his Jaffa to rough him up or anything. Sobek is hands down the weirdest Goa’uld Louis has ever met, though it’s a pretty short list.

He follows Sobek through the ship, along narrow, sparsely lit corridors to a room that seems far away from any of the busy parts of the ship, far away from any of the Jaffa. It has to be a trap, somehow. Maybe Sobek is taking him to his private torture dungeon.

The lights go on by themselves as Sobek lets them into a round room done up in more orange and gold, with heavy curtains covering the walls.

“There is someone I would like you to meet,” he says.

He leads Louis to a low basin in the centre of the room, like a fountain without the fountain part, and perches on the edge, trailing a hand in the water.

The hairs on the back of Louis’ neck rise. He doesn’t need to step closer to know that there’s a Goa’uld in the basin, wormy and translucent and so much grosser than he ever could have guessed from the pictures, and the reason why he was brought here becomes suddenly and terrifyingly clear.

“Come closer,” Sobek urges, when Louis stops a good two feet from where he’s sitting.

“I think I’m good.”

The goa’uld in the basin screeches in a nails-on-chalkboard pitch. Sobek smiles. Maybe it was telling him a joke, Louis thinks hysterically.

“This is Anen, my companion.”

“She’s lovely,” Louis manages.

Sobek turns to him with a frown. “He is very weak. Our enemies have hunted us ceaselessly.”

“Right,” says Louis, fighting the reflex to apologise.

“We Goa’uld have no concept of male or female, but some of us have… preferences,” says Sobek. “Anen prefers male hosts. As do I.”

“Right,” Louis says again. “And you want me to…?”

“Yes, when he is strong enough, you are to be his host.”

“You want me to be a host,” says Louis. “To your… companion.” He doesn’t do actual air quotes, but they’re implied.

“Yes,” says Sobek. “I believe you will be suitable.”

Louis doesn’t know what that means, exactly, except that Sobek seems to have misunderstood something very basic about Zayn, despite being _inside his head_. It would be funny if it wasn’t so completely fucked up.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” Louis says. “I’m not Zayn’s… mate. I mean, we’re mates, but we don’t… mate. If you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I am aware,” Sobek says gravely. “It is tragic that Tau’ri culture forces one to repress one’s true desires.”

“E-excuse me?” 

“There is no need to deny yourself,” Sobek says. He rises and comes to stand in front of Louis, tracing a slender finger along Louis’ jaw. “You will have what you desire, as will my host.”

“We’re _friends_ ,” says Louis, which is a lie, but not in the way that Sobek thinks it is. He’s standing very close, and Louis’ face feels hot. He wants so badly for Sobek to be right, but there’s just no way, this doesn’t make any sense. Zayn is with Perrie. The Goa’uld in his head thinks he wants to be with Louis, and he’s wrong, but he’s so close, and all Louis can think about is how fucking beautiful Zayn is, and how Louis could just–- but he can’t. This isn’t Zayn. He pushes Sobek away with a hand on his chest.

“Zayn doesn’t want this,” he says, looking anywhere but at Sobek.

“I assure you, he does.” Sobek grasps Louis’ arm. There’s no force to it, only temptation.

“ _You_ do,” says Louis. “He doesn’t.”

“Would you like him to tell you himself?” Sobek says, and without waiting for an answer he closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they look brighter, and he seems half an inch shorter, somehow softer. “Lou,” says Zayn in his normal voice, and his fingers tighten on Louis’ arm as if he thinks he’s going to slip away.

Louis feels like he’s going to be sick, and his eyes are stinging. “No,” he says. It’s not real, it has to be a trick. He squeezes his eyes shut. “Stop, please.”

Sobek says, “Very well,” and lets him go.

Louis opens his eyes and balls his hands into fists to stop them from shaking. 

“My guards will take you back to your cell.”

Louis desperately searches Sobek’s face for a clue of what just happened, what he’s thinking, but it’s like trying to read a porcelain doll.

The guards aren’t gentle with him, exactly, but they let him walk instead of dragging him.

*

Louis curls up in the corner of his cell and squeezes his eyes shut and tries to think of nothing. He presses his palms over his eyes to block out the orange light. “Why is everything fucking orange?” he screams at no one, leaping to his feet. “What is wrong with you people?”

He bangs on the bars of his cage. The guards ignore him.

Louis leans his forehead against the bars. This could be his last night as a human. Sobek’s only pretending to give him a choice. Louis can keep saying no, but unless he finds a way to escape, eventually it’s going to happen. This could be the quietest his head is ever going to be, and it’s already pretty damn loud without having a Goa’uld in there competing for attention.

He’s thinking he’d prefer not to be a Goa’uld host if he can help it, but he’s not leaving without Zayn, and he can think of worse things than ruling the galaxy at Zayn’s side, which is an insane thought to have, but no more insane than the past twenty-four hours have been. He’s thinking what if Sobek was right about Zayn and what he wants, but he shuts that thought down immediately. Zayn’s with Perrie. He’s been with Perrie for as long as Louis has known him, and they’re going to get married, and Zayn’s going to leave the team, and it’s going to kill Louis a little bit but it’s what he wants, and Zayn should get what he wants, even if it isn’t Louis. Which it isn’t.

When it finally clicks, it’s so obvious that it’s embarrassing that it took Louis so long to figure it out. Zayn would let Sobek get the wrong idea if he thought it would keep Perrie safe. If anyone’s clever enough to trick a Goa’uld, it’s Zayn. If Sobek thought Zayn was in love with Louis, that’s who he’d go after. It’s brilliant. Louis’ chest feels tight thinking about Zayn offering him up to save Perrie, but it makes sense, it’s… right. Louis has guns, and he’s had training. Maybe Zayn thought he would find a way to get them both out of here.

He’s always overestimated Louis.

Louis clenches his hands around the bars of his cell. “Hey,” he shouts at the Jaffa at the end of the corridor. “Tell him I’ll do it! Tell him I’ll be his host!”

*

Sobek takes him back up to the room with the basin the next day. Anen is still too weak to be implanted, he explains, but he wants him and Louis to get acquainted, whatever that means. Louis wonders bitterly whether he paid Zayn the same courtesy. Somehow, he doubts it.

Louis gets close enough that the toes of his boots touch the rim of the basin, this time, and he looks down into it the way he would look over the edge of a tall building.

“Hi there,” Louis says awkwardly. He’s very aware of Sobek hovering behind him. It’s a little like being on a date while his mum’s there. He watches Anen slither through the water, and he can’t think of anything he would less want to have inside his body for the rest of his life.

Sobek tells him about his life with Anen, about their vast empires, their palaces. They spent time on earth, he says. Louis pictures them in a nice pyramid with matching his and his Sphinxes. 

When Sobek talks about being hunted by the other system lords, he steps away from the basin, like he’s overcome with the memory. He turns his back to Louis, and Louis thinks _now_. He comes up behind him, slings one arm around his throat and tucks his hand into his other elbow, like he was taught, and holds him like that, tightly. Louis has never had to do this on anyone but his training partner at Cheyenne, and it takes a lot longer than he expected. Sobek thrashes and tries to claw at Louis’ arm, until he finally goes limp. Louis gently lowers him onto the floor. He looks like Zayn again without the scowl, and Louis says “Sorry, bro,” and means it.

He positions himself next to the doorway, and does his best Sobek impression when he shouts “JAFFA!”

A guard rushes in. “My lord?” he says, and kneels down next to the unconscious Sobek. 

Louis waits to make sure he’s alone, then sneaks up behind him, grabs his staff out of his hand and blasts him with it, which is pretty fucking cool.

It takes a long time to get the crocodile armour on, and it’s about five sizes too big for him, which isn’t going to make getting Sobek out unnoticed any easier. Louis’ first thought is to swing him over his shoulder and carry him out, but even if he could avoid running into any of the Jaffa, he can’t carry him that far. 

He ventures out into the hall to look for a better option, like a cart, or a conveniently placed rubbish chute. The third door he tries is a storage closet. He finds a weapons crate big enough to fit Zayn, with nice cushy straw inside. Must be his lucky day. He drags it back to the room and manhandles Zayn into it as carefully as he can manage, which isn’t very carefully, because Zayn’s a lot heavier than he looks, and Louis can’t move very well inside the armour. It’s incredibly hot, as well. No wonder Jaffa are always so cranky.

He’s solved the problem of how to get Zayn out without anyone noticing, but he hasn’t solved the problem of how to get him _out_. If Louis can’t lift him, he definitely can’t lift him inside a crate. He pushes the crate out into the hall and doesn’t get more than six feet before he has to pause to catch his breath.

Louis straightens when heavy clanky footsteps start coming down the hall behind him, and tries look imposing. He turns around to face the other Jaffa, lowering his voice to what he hopes is a convincing Jaffa pitch.

“Help me carry this to the cruisers,” he says, adding, “Our lord commands it.”

Nice touch, he thinks.

The Jaffa doesn’t question him. He obediently picks up one end of the crate while Louis struggles to get the armoured gloves around the edge on his side.

“You take the front, I’ll take the back,” Louis says in his fake Jaffa voice, which is murder on his throat but which seems to be doing the job. The Jaffa leads him down the hall, and down another hall, and finally, when Louis’ arms feel like they’re about to be torn from his shoulders any second, into a lift that takes them directly to the cargo bay.

They carry the crate to one of the cruisers, where the Jaffa lets it drop with a loud thud.

“Careful,” snaps Louis. He sets his end down gently. Hopefully it’s the end where Zayn’s head is.

The Jaffa dips his head remorsefully and closes the hatch of the cruiser behind him.

Louis is so close to freedom he can almost smell it; all he has to do is figure out how to fly this thing.

“Please work, please work, please work,” he chants under his breath as he places his hands over the red orb on the front console that’s supposed to be a steering wheel. The ship does nothing. Louis swipes his hands up, and the ship lurches and rises. It’s a bit like the trackpad on his laptop, except round, and finicky, and it could kill him if he gets it wrong. He moves his hands forward the slightest bit, and the ship glides towards the cargo bay doors, then hovers there awkwardly while Louis tries to figure out how to get those open. He touches a light that’s flashing on the console, and it stops flashing, but nothing else happens. 

He’ll never know if it was that, or someone on the ship doing it for him, but the doors shudder and open, though excruciatingly slowly.

“Sick,” Louis says out loud to no one as he steers the ship out of the cargo bay and into the blackness of space. It’s a pity Zayn is unconscious, because it was really a pretty impressive escape, if Louis does say so himself. Speaking of Zayn, he should probably get him out of that crate before he suffocates and this entire rescue plan will have been for nothing.

He takes his hands off the steering orb, and when the ship doesn’t immediately plummet into the void, he walks into the back to open the crate and lift Zayn out of it. He lays him down on his side so he won’t choke on his tongue and sits down at the console again. 

_Now what_ , he thinks. He has no idea where to go, except away from the pyramid ship, which looms huge through the window. If Louis were on an SGC ship, he could use the scanners to find the nearest planet with a Stargate, but all he has is this stupid Goa’uld ship that doesn’t have meters or panels, just lights glowing in different shades of orange and yellow, and besides the one that may or may not have been the controls for the cargo bay doors, Louis has no idea what any of them do. 

He hasn’t thought this through. Zayn’s going to wake up soon– _Sobek_ will, and he’ll be pissed. Even away from his crocodile guards and with all his Goa’uld whatsits safely left behind on the mothership, Louis isn’t sure how he’s going to handle him. He doesn’t know where the Tok’ra are. Even if he did, showing up on their doorstep with a semi-conscious Goa’uld and asking for an unscheduled extraction ceremony without SGC approval might not go over all that well.

This ship doesn’t even fit through the gate. He should have stolen something smaller.

He’s been flying in a random direction for a few hours when something – Zayn –- stirs behind him. Louis’ hand reaches for the handgun at his side, which isn’t there. He spins around in his chair.

“Lou?”

His eyes don’t glow. Fuck. Louis’ hand clenches reflexively. Zayn’s eyes aren’t glowing and he’s saying Louis’ name like he did before, in the chamber – like Sobek did. Louis isn’t ready for this at all, he isn’t prepared.

“Bro, where are we?”

“Uhh,” Louis says. “Hi? I stole a Goa’uld ship.”

Zayn is silent for a few seconds, blinking up at him from the floor of the ship.

“You know how to fly a Goa’uld ship?”

“Apparently I do. Sort of.”

Zayn pushes so he’s sitting up. Louis hadn’t actually bothered to tie him up; there had been no time. Weirdly, it worked out for him. No uncomfortable questions. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but apparently neither does Zayn, if he is Zayn. Maybe he’s just forgotten he’s a Goa’uld. Maybe Sobek died. It could happen. Louis could get lucky, for once in his goddamned life.

“My head is killing me," Zayn says conversationally, like it’s the morning after having a pint or two too many at the pub. He rubs the back of his head, and Louis sincerely hopes he never has to explain to him where that bump came from. “Where are we?” Zayn asks again.

“Dunno, mate. Space?”

Zayn comes over to the front of the ship and sits down in the co-pilot’s chair.

“Use the scanners?” he says, like it’s obvious. He taps a few of the blinking lights, and a screen rises out of the console, dotted with little glowing orbs mapped on concentric rings. Zayn is a genius. Louis tries hard to look like his sudden ability to operate Goa’uld technology is, you know, normal.

“Check if there’s one with a gate,” Louis says.

Zayn taps at a few more lights. “This one’s close,” he says, pointing at a planet on the scanner. “Go to that one.”

“Northeast, then?”

“No,” says Zayn, frowning at the map. “Well, yeah.”

“Brilliant,” says Louis, and he adjusts his hands on the orb.

“Are the lads alright?” Zayn ask. “Everything work out with Niall and the vines?”

“He’s fine, they’re great. They’ll be happy to have you back.”

Zayn leans back in his chair, pushes with his foot to turn it enough to face Louis. “Hey,” he says, and grins, wide and loose and perfectly, unmistakably Zayn. “You came for me.”

“Yeah,” says Louis. “You should have seen me, man. I was awesome.”

“That’s sick.”

Louis wants to ask how much he remembers, if he knows how long he’s been gone, if Sobek is still in there, but he bites his lip and says nothing. If Zayn doesn’t remember anything, he’d rather keep it that way, at least until they’re safely home.

“You’ll need to find some fuel,” Zayn says. He points at a completely unremarkable orange light on the console, just one among many.

“What?”

“You’ve got less than a quarter tank left. We’re fifty light years from that planet, we’ll never make it.”

“Fuck,” says Louis. His luck had to run out eventually, but he was hoping it would last just a little longer, just past the point where they’re drifting in space with no fuel, no food, and no hope of rescue. “Does it say if there’s a reserve tank?”

Zayn scans the console while Louis silently prays for another fuel tank, a juiced-up escape pod, anything.

“I think this is the reserve tank.”

“Fuck,” Louis says again.

“There’s a planet closer, but it doesn’t have a gate. We’ll just about make it there, though.”

“Does it have, you know, air?”

“Yeah, everything on here is habitable.”

Zayn doesn’t seem to be concerned by his sudden mastery of Goa’uld technology, just gives Louis this sidelong glance like he doesn’t understand why Louis can’t read the console, and a smile that’s part mocking, part fond. Louis has missed that look on Zayn’s face. He’s missed all of the looks Zayn’s face can make, if he’s honest. He has to bite back a rush of emotion, and as if sensing it – as if he’s broadcasting it through his hands to the stupid red orb – the ship suddenly lurches forward, sending both of them sprawling across the console. Louis fucking hates the Goa’uld.

“Maybe you should drive,” he tells Zayn.

This is better. It’ll let him keep an eye on Zayn, for one thing, in case this sudden amnesia thing wears off, or turns out to be a trick. He knows symbiotes can relinquish control of their hosts when they want to, like the Tok’ra, like they’re timesharing a body. But the one that’s inside Zayn seemed pretty content to be in charge, and he had all these big plans for him and Anen, so it doesn’t make any sense why he would just let Zayn take over. Unless Louis knocked something loose when he choked him, or when the Jaffa dropped him. Louis winces thinking about it, even though Zayn seems fine. He might just gloss over that part in the mission report. As always, what the SGC doesn’t know won’t hurt them, or Louis.

*

Zayn’s landing isn’t the kind you’d get up and applaud for, but the ship is still in one piece when he sets it down, and so are they, which is more than they could have hoped for with the fuel gauges blaring their alarms at them.

They spend their first day exploring the planet, though they make sure they stay within walking range of the ship. They don’t find much of anything. They landed in the foothills of a large mountain range whose peaks stretch seemingly endlessly above them. There’s a thick forest around the clearing where the ship is, and no signs of habitation.

They bunk in the ship their first night, but without power, the air quickly becomes stuffy, and when the planet’s twin suns rise in the morning they bake the metal hull until staying inside becomes unbearable. They pack up their meagre supplies – anything in the ship that’s not nailed down, except the crate, which comes down to one staff weapon, a blanket, and what looks like Jaffa emergency rations – and set out to find somewhere better to make camp.

The find a cave not far from the ship that’s near a stream with clear, cool water, and they move their stuff into it. They’re cave-dwellers now. Maybe Zayn can do some nice paintings in animal blood for future generations of explorers to find. That is if they don’t starve to death or get eaten by whatever indigenous life form they can hear prowling around outside at night. It sounds big, and toothy, but Louis isn’t a xenobiologist so he couldn’t say for sure.

Louis finds a Dairy Milk bar in a pocket of his tac-vest, which brings their total provisions to half a Dairy Milk bar each, and the hard, brown squares that make up the Jaffa rations. They taste like socks.

“No offence, but I wish Niall was here,” says Zayn on one of their foraging runs, morosely studying a bush whose berries give off a faint purple glow. Louis hopes they won’t be stuck here long enough that they have to find out whether those are edible.

They gather some dry branches and return to their cave. “Home sweet home,” says Louis. It turns out those Jaffa staffs are pretty good for making fire as well as blowing holes in people, so they might be lost and stranded, but at least they’re warm, and no one’s trying to shoot them, so it’s not all bad.

Zayn sleeps through most of the next day, leaving Louis to explore the cave, which is empty aside from some bat-like creatures and a brackish pond deeper down. He goes through all the compartments of his vest and lays out their supplies neatly. One bar of Dairy Milk. A ton of bullets for a gun that’s still on the pyramid ship. A pocket knife. Waterproof matches. A portable radio. Louis tries every frequency, though he knows it’s futile. Then he tries them again. He counts the Jaffa food – twelve squares. Twelve days of food, if they can survive on half a square each, which is more than Louis can stomach.

Zayn is still asleep when both suns set, one after the other. The cave cools down quickly, and Louis wastes twenty minutes trying to get Zayn to release his vice-grip on the blanket so they can share. Zayn is still impossible to wake, so Louis gives up and curls up against him, letting himself be warmed by Zayn’s body heat and the miniscule corner of the blanket he’s wrestled free.

He half expects to wake up to Sobek pointing the staff weapon at his face, but Zayn’s still there in the morning, slowly chewing on a square of Jaffa food. He breaks off a piece for Louis, who takes it reluctantly, though he’s still not sure he wouldn’t rather starve than eat this shit.

Zayn’s made a fire, and Louis shuffles up to it gratefully.

“I’m sorry this is such a shit rescue,” he says around a mouthful of food.

“‘S alright.” 

Zayn smiles lazily. He somehow manages to make leaning against the wall of a cave look comfortable, slouching like all of the bones in his body are made of rubber.

“Did you get a haircut?” he asks, studying Louis in the firelight. He frowns. “How long was I gone?”

Louis busies himself disentangling the knot in his bootlaces from where he kicked them off without untying them last night. “Oh, you know,” he says vaguely.

It was eighteen months and three weeks, almost to the day, but what if telling Zayn wakes up his snake again? Louis looks up at him without raising his head. What if it died? He’s never heard of a Goa’uld just dying, but it could happen. Could it happen without taking the host with it? Maybe it fell asleep. Forget Niall, Louis needs Jackson here, or even Teal’c, though Teal’c scares the shit out of him.

Louis clears his throat. “You know how it is, keeping track of time when you’re bouncing from this planet to the next.” He hopes it doesn’t sound as strained as it seems to his own ears. “Found you on a pyramid ship. Snuck you out wearing the guard armour. Anyway, let’s go find something to eat.”

“We already did,” Zayn says, looking at him with his head tilted to one side. “Look for it, I mean. We didn’t find anything.”

“Yeah, I know,” Louis says. “I was there.”

Louis is fucking it up already. He’s messing up the whole thing. He’s shit at rescuing Zayn, and he’s shit at lying to Zayn, and he’s not entirely certain Zayn wasn’t better off where he was, on the pyramid ship with his fancy clothes and his fancy banquets and all the blankets he could ever want.

“So what were you planning to do?” Zayn asks, but before Louis can protest that _actually_ , he didn’t _plan_ on getting stranded on a deserted planet with no Stargate at all, thank you, Zayn is talking again.

“Were you just not going to bring up the Goa’uld in my head and hope I’d never find out?”

“Uh,” Louis says intelligently.

“He’s _in here_ , Lou,” says Zayn, pointing aggressively at his own head. “And you thought I didn’t know?”

“I wasn’t sure! You got hit in the head! I didn’t want to risk, like, waking him up again. I’m _sorry_.”

“You hit me in the head?!”

“ _No_ , it was an accident.”

“Yeah, alright,” Zayn says mildly. If it were anyone else, Louis would think he was sulking, but he knows Zayn believes him. “So how long?”

“A year and a half,” says Louis, and he watches Zayn’s face fall. “We didn’t know where you were. We should have figured it out sooner.”

“It’s not your fault,” says Zayn.

“It was.”

“Nah,” says Zayn. “It’s this fucker.” He points at his head again.

He’s quiet for a while, staring at the floor of the cave lost in thought. Louis wants to give him a hug, or something, but maybe he should just let him be.

“So how’s it feel to have a man inside you?” Louis says into the silence when he can’t take it any more.

Zayn’s laugh sounds like it takes him by surprise, and it goes all the way to his eyes, which is the best thing Louis has seen in close to nineteen months.

“He’s been pretty quiet since we got off the ship. I think it’s ‘cos he’s away from the sarcophagus. He’s really old.”

“D’you think he’ll just die if we stick it out long enough?” Louis says.

“Nah. He’s thousands of years old, I think he’ll last longer than us,” Zayn says, before lapsing into silence again. 

Louis isn’t very good with silence, as anyone who’s met him will confirm. He’d gotten used to Zayn being quiet when he was working, because it’s hard to draw and talk at the same time, he’d explained once. Louis must have fallen out of the habit while he was gone, though, and it takes effort not to fill the silence up with chatter, to let Zayn work through his thoughts.

Louis can tell without seeing his face that Zayn feels guilty – something about the tilt of his shoulders, how tightly he’s holding himself. He’s spent enough time watching Zayn to have become an expert in his body language.

“I found some statues in the temple, back on Theremus,” Zayn says without looking up. “They weren’t statues. I should’ve known better.”

“You shouldn’t have been there by yourself.”

“They would have just taken you too, mate, there were like twenty Jaffa. Stop saying it’s your fault.”

“Alright,” Louis concedes.

Not saying it’s his fault doesn’t make it any less his fault, but Zayn’s stubborn, and their only blanket is too small and the nights too cold for this to be worth arguing over.

*

They spend their days exploring, gathering firewood, and foraging for things they’ll later decide against trying to eat. They need to come up with a long-term plan, but Louis has never seen _Castaway_ all the way through and he can’t think of anything, save for learning how to make rocket fuel using only matches, branches, and possibly radioactive berries.

He leaves Zayn asleep one morning and walks a wide circle around the cave. There’s only trees, and rocks, and nothing at all they can use. Louis smuggled a Goa’uld system lord out of a pyramid ship all by himself and he’s going to die of starvation or cabin fever on this fucking rock without ever getting to tell Carter she was wrong about Zayn.

He’s already in a foul mood when he gets back to the cave to find Zayn there, scowling, holding himself straight like he’s trying to balance a stack of books on his head, or like he’s got a massive stick up his arse.

 

“Oh, it’s you,” Louis says. “Marvellous.”

“You were foolish to think you could escape,” says Sobek. “My Jaffa will rip you to shreds.”

“Mate, your Jaffa couldn’t even stop me from taking you on your own ship. You need to hire some new people.”

“And what is to stop me from leaving? You?"

“I could shoot you,” Louis points out, gesturing with the staff weapon he’d brought with him on his little expedition.

Sobek smirks. “You would not. You... care about my host. You went to a great deal of trouble to free him. In vain.”

“Fine. Walk out. Where the fuck would you go? We've been trying to get off this goddamn rock for weeks."

He thinks it’s been weeks. It feels like weeks. It’s hard to tell, what with the suns.

Louis pushes past Sobek and into the cave. Goa'uld on their own are pretty pathetic. Sometimes Louis doesn't get how the system Lords have so much power. They're not strong, they're not particularly intelligent. They live a long time, but only because of the sarcophagus. A Goa'uld without Jaffa is just a worm making your friend's eyes glow and his voice sound funny, and making him sound pompous when he’s standing in a fucking cave in a stupid robe.

“Your friend is not impressed with your attempt to rescue him, though he may be too polite to say so.”

Sobek grins cruelly, which looks bizarre on Zayn’s face. “I understand this is not the first time you have disappointed him.”

"Piss off," Louis grits out. 

He clenches his hand around the staff uselessly. He wants this asshole to stop talking like he knows Zayn, like he understands anything of what they've been through together over the last five years. Actually, he just wants him to not talk, full stop. Maybe he'll knock him out again. The fact that he can’t shoot Sobek to shut him up maybe isn’t the worst part of Zayn having a Goa’uld in him, but it’s definitely top five in Louis’ mental list, just below being the indirect cause of Louis living in a cave.

Suddenly, Sobek shudders and slumps, pressing his hands to the sides of his face. “Fuck,” he says, and then “Off,” in Zayn’s voice. He stays like that for a second, hunched over, and when he straightens he’s Zayn again, looking horrified.

“Fuck, Lou, don’t listen to him,” he says, grabbing Louis by the shoulders. “I don’t think that, I would never think that.”

“Okay,” Louis says thickly, wiping at his wet cheeks.

Zayn hugs him so tightly Louis can barely breathe, and doesn’t let go for a long time. “You have to believe me, okay?” he says.

“Okay,” says Louis.

*

Louis has barely slept, but the suns are already rising again, filling the cave with a weird, blue light. He can’t get used to the cycles on this planet; it feels like it’s always day, and only the colour of the light changes. There must be a pattern to how the suns behave, but you’d have to be Rodney McKay to figure it out. Or anyone but Louis Tomlinson, that’d probably do.

Zayn’s side of the Jaffa field-issue blanket is empty. Louis sits up, wraps the blanket around himself like a cape and shuffles out to the entrance of the cave, where he can just make out a silhouette in the blue dawn. It better be Zayn. They’re down to their last two squares of Jaffa food, and Louis doesn’t have the strength to deal with Sobek, not on what felt like twenty minutes of sleep.

“Hey,” says Zayn, as Louis walks up to him.

He’s leaning his chin on his arm, which is propped on his drawn-up knees, all of him folded like a cat, loose and soft. Louis sits next to him and leans into the softness and the warmth a bit, offers Zayn his end of the blanket back. It feels like every time he sees Zayn he’s the happiest he’s ever been to see Zayn, and not Sobek, whose separation from his sarcophagus has made him not only weaker, but meaner.

“It’s kind of pretty, isn’t it?” Zayn says, nodding at the sloping hills, the forests stretching as far as they can see, all of it painted shades of blue. “‘S weird no one lives here. Shame.”

“Hmm,” Louis says vaguely. He’s not looking at the view; he has his face buried in the fabric of Zayn’s weird robe, which is soft, like everything else about him. Either way, he’s too sleepy to be poetic about the deserted rock they’re stranded on.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think,” Zayn says, after a pause long enough that Louis had almost fallen asleep again.

“Mmh. Just now?”

“Like, this whole time.”

“About what?”

“I never said thank you. For rescuing me.”

Louis laughs into Zayn’s shoulder. “‘Cos that went so well.”

“You could have left me there, you know. Come back with the Daedalus, like.”

“That’s a way better plan,” says Louis. “I should have thought of that.”

Zayn huffs a laugh. “I’m trying to say something nice, you prick.”

“Alright, say something nice, then.”

Louis lifts his head so he can look at Zayn while he says nice things to him. 

“It’s like, when you’re shut in your own head, and all you can do is watch, and you don’t know if it’s ever going to end, or if you’re ever going home… it makes you think,” Zayn says. “About stuff you did. And stuff you never did.”

Zayn doesn’t usually look at Louis this intensely, like he’s studying him. It’s usually Louis who does the looking. His eyes are very big this close, his mouth very pink from where he keeps biting his lip between sentences. Louis is hopeless.

“All that stuff with Anen, I think it was ‘cause I missed you, and he could tell. That it wasn’t like. How I was supposed to miss you.”

Zayn snakes his hand under the blanket, finds Louis’, and curls his fingers around his wrist so they’re palm to palm. He blinks slowly, then tips forward just slightly. They’re close enough that it changes the whole angle, that it looks like the preamble to something else.

Louis closes his eyes for a second, which is a mistake, because it makes it too easy to pretend it’s Zayn touching him, that Sobek wasn’t full of shit before, that all these years Louis spent looking and wanting and pining, it wasn’t just him being hopeless. That Zayn was looking too.

At the last second, he twists his head to the side, and Zayn misses his mouth and kisses his cheek, instead. When he pulls back he looks confused, more than anything.

“I know it's you,” Louis says. His voice comes out all fucked up, but he’s impressed it comes out at all.

“What?”

Louis stands up, letting the blanket drop from his shoulders. Zayn looks very small curled up like that, looking up at Louis. Small and wounded, draped in the blanket, both suns climbing over the mountains behind him. 

“Don't bother. God, I can’t believe I almost fell for that.”

Louis turns around and walks away without waiting for a reply. He tucks his hands under his arms against the morning chill, and to keep them steady. 

He couldn’t have missed the flashing eyes; he was looking right at him. He doesn't know how Sobek did the voice. It was good, though. Convincing. He had Louis for a minute, there. A minute more, and he probably would have let himself be talked into going back and becoming the little snail house for Anen to make a home in.

Louis walks past the cave and out into the forest behind it, not looking where he’s going. He walks fast, or as fast as he can without tripping over himself. He doesn't have a destination in mind. They never found any place worth going on this world, at least not that they could walk to. He just needs to get out of that cave, away from Zayn or Sobek or whoever he’s blessed with today. 

What if he can’t tell any more when he’s one or the other? What if he never could?

 

The forest is thick, lush with plants that would probably kill you if you tried to eat them. Louis has to wrangle some slimy hanging vines a few times. He tries to cut through them with his knife, but they just make a squeaky sound and slip out of his hands, so he settles for pushing them aside and squeezing between them. Probably better that way. You never know what might turn out to be alive and pissed off that you stabbed it. Louis remembers the vines in Theremus; they had to have come from somewhere. He shudders.

 

It takes him fifteen minutes to realise he’s lost. 

Fifteen minutes later, he’s very lost.

Another fifteen minutes after that, he trips over something that makes a dull clunking noise when it makes contact with his boot, and he scrapes his elbow and both his hands going down.

*

“Are you mad?!” Zayn says by way of greeting when Louis finally makes it back to the cave. He grabs Louis roughly by the shoulders, then shoves him back. “I looked for you for _hours_.”

“Yeah, it was stupid, I know, I’m sorry.”

Louis doesn’t bother trying to work if whether he’s talking to Zayn or Sobek. It’s really not important. They both want to get out of here, and Louis isn’t going to waste his time. “Listen,” he says. Zayn opens his mouth again. “ _Listen_ ,” Louis repeats more loudly. “I found a gate.”

“You– what?”

“In the forest. I got lost and I found a gate, but it’s mostly buried so I couldn’t check if it’s working. We should go back there before I forget where it is. Go get your stuff.”

Zayn takes the blanket and what’s left of their food, while Louis grabs the staff weapon. He’d kept a close eye on the compass on his pocket knife as he was trying to navigate his way back, using the peaks of the mountains as his guide, so he knows which way to go. The forest still shows signs of his journey back, too – snapped branches, trampled shrubs. It still takes them the better part of the afternoon to find the clearing again, but it’s worth it just for the look of pure awe on Zayn’s face.

They have a gate, which is a massive improvement on where they were this morning, but there’s no DHD, and neither of them are engineers. They search the woods around the clearing for hours, tilling the springy ground with the toes of their boots in case the DHD’s covered under a few centuries of moss. A metal detector would be useful, Louis thinks, or one of those portable dialling devices, but they were never the exploring kind of gate team, they’re the second wave, checking up and setting up research posts, which is of absolutely no help to them right now unless Zayn can somehow analyse a cave painting that will tell them how to get out of here.

“Can we dial it manually?” Zayn suggests.

They look at each other for a second, then Louis shrugs. It’s not like they have anything else to do.

They spend hours digging the gate out of the soggy, mossy ground with their hands. They don’t bother putting it upright; it’s not as if they can lift it, and it works just fine this way as long as you’re going in instead of coming out. When they finally have all the moss cleared off, they stand on opposite sides of it and crouch down to turn the outer ring, like a giant rotary phone.

The gate’s inner ring is heavy, and it must be rusted or something, from probably centuries of moss growing on it. They manage, though, to turn it so it’s pointing at the wonky C with the little dot, and Louis has never seen anything more beautiful than the first chevron locking and lighting up. This thing still has some juice, then, and they might not have to spend the rest of their lives in a cave, after all.

The second chevron, the one that looks like a weird saucepan, gives them a little more trouble. The ring almost jams, and it takes Louis banging it with the butt of the staff weapon to get it going again, but it connects, and it locks with a satisfying metallic clank. Louis has heard that sound hundreds of times before, but he’s never appreciated it enough.

They twist the ring for the third chevron, the one Louis thinks of as a lopsided, backwards K. It goes until it doesn’t, and no amount of banging it, or shoving or kicking or throwing rocks at it gets it moving again.

“FUCK,” Louis shouts. He curses until he runs out of breath, and when he’s done the gate is still stuck. They're still stuck, and for all that effort they’re no closer to going home. 

“Zayn,” says Louis through gritted teeth. “If you turn into the Goa’uld and start berating me for this, I’m shooting you in the foot.”

“Fair enough,” Zayn says mildly. He holds his anger coiled inside him, and Louis has to read it in the set of his jaw, the furrow of his brows. 

*

They’re too far from the cave to make the trek back before it gets dark, so they roll themselves into the blanket and sleep in the hollow of a tree, like hobbits. Louis wakes up damp and unhappy and his elbow hurts.

“Bye, you piece of shit,” he tells the gate as they pass it on their way back. He gives it a good kick, and is disappointed when it doesn’t belatedly spring to life again.

They’ve been walking for about an hour when Zayn suddenly stops Louis with a hand on his arm. He holds a finger to his lips. “Do you hear that?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“I thought I heard a ship,” says Zayn. “Guess I’m going mad.”

The walk seems longer on the way back, with nothing to look forward to but returning to the cave. Still, Louis is relieved when they reach their cruiser, which means they’re almost there.

“Did we leave the hatch open?” Zayn asks as they pass it.

“Dunno,” says Louis, then freezes.

“You heard that too, right?” Zayn whispers.

“Yeah.”

They’re footsteps. Someone’s here. Someone’s been poking around the cruiser. Louis and Zayn had haphazardly thrown some branches over the ship when they left it, but since it’s kind of massive and the planet seemed deserted, they didn’t make much of a real effort to hide it. 

Louis creeps behind the ship and peers around the corner of it. There’s four of them, prodding at the remains of Zayn and Louis’ fire with the butts of their staffs. They look like Jaffa, but they’re not wearing armour, just the flat, metal caps covering their hair.

“Maybe the gate was boobytrapped,” Zayn whispers. “Alarmed, like.”

One of the Jaffa looks up, and Louis shoots back behind the ship.

He’s running through the options in his head, which doesn’t take long because they don’t have that many options. There’s hiding, which seems like an obvious choice. He’s still got the crocodile armour, but it’s in the ship, and there’s no way he’s going to get that on without the Jaffa hearing him.

“Don’t move,” Louis hisses through his teeth when Zayn walks past him, out from behind the ship. The Jaffa have their backs turned, but they’re close, they could spot him any second. 

“ _Zayn_.”

Zayn turns around slowly. “Silence,” he booms in the echo-y voice. His hair’s a strange colour in the blue sunlight, almost turquoise, and his eyes flash, and he’s never looked less like Zayn.

“For fuck’s sake,” Louis mutters.

“Jaffa,” says Sobek, and they all turn around at once. “Kree!”

Louis didn’t think the crocodile guards were smart enough to find Sobek, and it looks like he was right. The Jaffa don’t immediately fall at Sobek’s feet. They point their weapons at him instead, which means they must be a rival Goa’uld’s guards. 

Louis’ options have narrowed down to staying where he is, or joining Sobek, and he decides that he’d rather be back in Goa’uld prison than stuck here alone, and appears from behind the ship with his hands raised.

Half of the staff weapons pointed at Sobek swing so they’re pointed at Louis.

“He is of the Tau’ri,” one of Jaffa says, but his voice has the same warble to it as Sobek’s, which means he’s not Jaffa. 

“Actually, we both are,” Louis says, going off a hunch. “He was kidnapped by the Goa’uld and now we’re stuck here. Hi. Please tell me you have a ship.”

*

The Tok’ra won’t tell them they’re Tok’ra. It’s like _Fight Club_. They take them back to their ship, which is about the same shape and size as the cruiser Louis stole, but hopefully with more fuel, and they discuss in hushed tones what to do with the two of them, without ever lowering their weapons.

The second time the dark-haired woman starts to say they cannot compromise the location of their base for what could very well be a trap, she’s interrupted by Zayn, who strains against the ropes the Tok’ra have tied them with, then sinks back down. He blinks a few times, and very quietly says, “Are you Tok’ra?”

The Tok’ra look at him as if he’s grown an extra head.

“I think my Goa’uld might be dying, so can you please decide whether you want to help us?” says Zayn.

“What?” says Louis.

“You are Tau’ri?” says the dark-haired woman.

“Yeah. Zayn Malik. I’m with SG-11.”

“Seriously, Zayn, what?” Louis repeats, but the Tok’ra talks over him again.

“What is your Goa’uld’s name?”

“Sobek,” Zayn says.

The woman’s face clouds over. She must have met him, then, Louis thinks. Quite the charmer, even among his own kind.

“Was Anen with him?”

“Maybe you can interrogate him later?” Louis suggests. “Like after you get that thing out of his head?”

The Tok’ra woman looks at him like she has a few choice words to say about Louis calling the Goa’uld “that thing”, but is trying very hard not to say them. She nods at one of the other Tok’ra, who approaches Zayn wearing one of those complicated bracelets with the chains running up his fingertips and the glowing crystal over his palm. 

“This will not harm you,” he says, crouching in front of Zayn. He holds the crystal over Zayn’s forehead, where it begins to glow, pulsing like a strobe light. The Tok’ra look at each other, conferring silently.

“What does that mean?” asks Louis.

“We will help you,” says the woman. “Our numbers are already few, as you know, and we run a great risk, bringing you to our base. However,” she says, turning to Zayn. “Sobek must answer for his crimes.”

The Tok’ra don’t untie them. Louis was really looking forward to watching the planet grow smaller and smaller as they finally speed away from it, but it’s cool. They’re getting out of here. Zayn is going to be okay. He shuffles closer to Zayn until their shoulders are touching.

Pretty decent rescue, all in all.

*

 

Louis can’t sleep in the Tok’ra tunnels. Something about the weird, glowy light, the hard bed with just a thin sheet of slippery fabric posing as a duvet. The fact that they’re underground, and there’s no windows, though he doesn’t usually have any trouble with the bunks at the SGC. He likes a blanket, that’s all. A door to close. It feels like there’s a Tok’ra serenely swishing by every five minutes.

He gives up on trying to sleep after he’s studied the faceted sparkly rock ceiling for the better part of an hour. SG-5 are coming to pick them up in the morning. Louis would really have liked to have seen Carter’s face when the Tok’ra dialed them, but it’s enough, for now, just to know they’re going home. 

Zayn was right about the gate being rigged. The planet they were on is called Koplides, or it was once, when people lived on it, and it was a Tok’ra base for a time. They disabled the gate after they left, buried it, and put a tracker on it that would send them a signal if anyone tried to dial it. Louis is pretty happy the Tok’ra are so paranoid. It worked out well for them.

Someone softly swishes up to Louis’ doorway and then stops, blocking the light streaming in from the hallway. Louis doesn’t need to look up to know it’s Zayn.

They've given him a white robe with sleeves so long they almost swallow up his hands. He looks like a Jedi. A very tired Jedi; he’s got bags under his eyes and and a slump in his shoulders. Louis has never had a Goa’uld extracted from him, but he imagines it’s somewhat taxing, to say the least.

Louis sits up, making space for Zayn to sit down on the edge of the outcrop of crystal serving as Louis’ bed, on the corner of the shimmery blanket. The Tok’ra kept the extraction ceremony short, because they didn’t know how much time they had before Sobek died and took the host with him. They explained that he could have lasted years, or hours, and that it was impossible to know. It still took two hours, with the woman who’d found them, Rana, reading a list of Sobek’s crimes which, while incomplete, made Louis’ stomach churn.

“How do you feel?” Louis asks Zayn.

“Weird,” says Zayn. “Quiet.” He frowns. “Rana says they’ll collapse the tunnels and find a new planet to move to tomorrow. All ‘cause of me.”

“It’s what they do.”

“I guess,” Zayn says. 

“They seemed pretty happy Sobek got his, though. I think you did them a favour.”

Zayn picks at his nails and doesn’t look at Louis. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that he was dying. I didn’t even know until a few days ago.”

“That’s alright,” says Louis, and he means it. He hates being out of the loop, but knowing wouldn’t have made a difference. If the Tok’ra hadn’t found them, neither of them would have made it, but they did, so it doesn’t matter. They’re going home. Zayn should stop worrying. Louis covers Zayn’s hands with his own, forcing him to stop fidgeting.

Zayn threads their fingers together. “I think you should know that… it wasn't him. When I…” He swallows and starts over. “Back on the planet, that was me. When I tried to kiss you.”

 

He’s still not looking at Louis.

“Oh,” Louis says.

He doesn’t immediately know what to do with that information, but his mouth doesn’t wait for his brain to catch up. It never has. “That’s alright,” he says. “You were under a lot of stress, it’s no big deal.”

“Yeah, alright,” says Zayn. 

They’re going home, which means Zayn is going back to Perrie, like he should. This doesn’t mean anything. It probably gets confusing, having another person in your head. Louis is fine. So what if he hadn’t actually considered that getting Zayn home means this might be the last time they’re off-world together.

“You should sleep,” Louis says, and before Zayn gets a chance to get up, he pulls him down onto the bed. He goes easily, and Louis fits himself around him, like they did on Koplides, sharing their one blanket. Maybe that’s why Louis couldn’t sleep. Maybe he got used to having someone else there.

The bed’s too narrow to lie down comfortably together, and Louis thinks it’s no wonder the Tok’ra are dying out, between that and the complete lack of privacy anywhere on their base.

“I’m well sick of caves,” he whispers.

Zayn’s laughter is a puff of warm breath on Louis’ hand, where it’s tangled all up with Zayn’s.

*

They keep the two of them locked in the mountain for a week, officially to quarantine them, because they were on a planet outside the gate system, and they could have dragged god-knows-what in with them. Unofficially, but more plausibly, it’s because the SGC doesn’t trust they’re not both compromised, Goa’uld agents, like Tok’ra security measures aren’t good enough for them any more.

Staying in the mountain is a lot like living in a cave, except that Louis doesn’t see the sky at all. The beds are comfortable, and they get to eat real food, and Zayn slowly starts to look like himself again. The lads meet them in the gate room when they first get back, and they breach at least three subsections of the SGC’s code of conduct welcoming them back. They keep Louis and Zayn company when they can. Niall’s been doing labwork, Harry and Liam temporarily reassigned to other gate teams. It grates to watch them step through the wormhole under someone else’s command, but it’s only temporary. Louis will have his team back. The SGC is pretty impressed with him despite everything; there’s whispers of a commendation, maybe a promotion. You know, after they make sure neither of them sold out earth to the Goa’uld. Captain Louis Tomlinson sounds pretty sick, he has to admit.

They let them go in the end, with a pat on the shoulder and an implied _No hard feelings_ , and Louis drives Zayn home. It feels weird to be wearing civilian clothes again, not to have the P90 crossed in front of his chest. It feels weird to be driving, and to see that many people, all those lights, flashing neon signs.

“New Taco Bell,” Louis points out as they pass it. Zayn hums vaguely. He’s got his head leaned against the car door, staring out the window. It must be even weirder for him.

When they get to Zayn’s flat, Louis lingers awkwardly in the doorway, watching Zayn picking up and putting down his stuff. There’s a magazine open on the coffee table, an empty coffee cup. Louis wonders if that’s been there this whole time, or if it’s Perrie’s. The place doesn’t look lived in, exactly, but it looks like it’s been cleaned more recently than eighteen months ago.

Louis should go, brush the dust off his own apartment, which he’s certain looks a lot worse than this despite the fact he hasn’t been gone nearly as long. He should ring his mum, and leave Zayn to readjust, but Zayn looks lost, running his hand along the wall as he walks into the kitchen. Louis watches as he opens the fridge. He braces for the smell, but it’s spotless, emptied.

“Did you– ?” Zayn says.

“Nah.”

“Perrie.” 

The fridge door closes with a sigh.

Zayn’s roots are coming in dark underneath the green, his hair long enough now to curl over his forehead. He’s still wearing the stud in his nose, though Louis isn’t sure he’s noticed.

Louis wants to ask about Perrie, but he isn’t about to. The SGC had let Zayn leave the base to see her the day after he got back, with a chaperone, because they weren’t finished debriefing him, scanning him, generally asserting he wasn’t a threat to national or global security. Zayn never brought it up again. Louis tries to imagine what it’s like when your missing fiancé shows up after nearly two years, looking like he’s joined a punk band, and can’t even tell you where he’s been, because it’s classified, half their lives are classified. What did they talk about, Louis wonders. The weather? The Beyoncé albums Zayn missed?

“I should go,” says Louis. Zayn is still standing by the fridge, not saying anything, but he looks up.

“Could you– I know you probably have stuff to do, but could you stay a bit? I don’t know if I remember how to be alone.” He rubs the back of his neck like he’s embarrassed.

“Yeah, of course. Do you want to order pizza?”

“Yeah,” says Zayn with a grateful smile.

*

They get pizza and beer, and it’s all soothingly normal, until Zayn goes a little deer-in-headlights when Louis turns on the TV.

“Is it weird being back?” Louis asks between two mouthfuls of pepperoni with extra cheese.

“Yeah it’s like, I missed so much?”

Zayn pauses, and it seems like he’s just going to leave it at that, the world’s shortest heart-to-heart. He stares at the TV glassily, clearly not taking much in of what’s happening on this A-Team rerun. 

“It doesn’t feel like I was gone that long, but it’s been ages, you know,” Zayn says, finally. “Everyone thought I was gone forever. Dead, like. My family, Perrie. Perrie’s got a new boyfriend. It’s weird.”

“She does?” says Louis.

“Yeah, but like. It’s fine? I think it probably would have happened anyway, if I’d been here. We had a massive fight before I left. It’s weird, but, I’m okay.”

“Oh,” says Louis. “Okay.” He wonders how many more things Zayn just didn’t find time to tell him while they were stuck on Koplides with nothing to do, which is unfair, probably. He was dealing with Sobek, with Sobek dying and possibly taking Zayn with him, and Louis is being selfish.

“I guess I should feel worse about it? But it’s just–”

 _Weird_ , Louis thinks, which is maybe the only word that sums up the past year and a half of Zayn’s life.

“Sometimes I kind of miss him? Sobek. But I feel bad about it, because he’s like,” Zayn makes a vague hand motion and trails off into silence.

“Evil? Set on destroying earth and enslaving humanity?” Louis fills in.

“Yeah,” Zayn says. “He was awful, and he did awful things and I was there for all of it. But he was wicked smart, and he loved Anen – like, just the same as we love people, and he knew so much.” Zayn laughs softly. “Pretty much everything I thought I knew about pre-modern Goa’uld art was unbelievably wrong.”

“Good thing I don’t know anything about pre-modern Goa’uld art,” Louis mumbles.

He turned the TV off a while ago. It was distracting, and he could barely hear Zayn over it, but now it’s too quiet, and Louis is too aware of the long silences between when either of them speaks.

“Do you ever wish I’d said yes?” he says, when Zayn doesn’t say anything else. “To Anen?”

“No,” Zayn says, wide-eyed in alarm. “Mate, no. I wouldn’t want that for anyone. It’s like having this really vivid, really fucked up dream that you can’t wake up from, and sometimes you think you’re awake? But then you were just dreaming inside your dream, like.”

“Okay,” Louis says, though he didn’t follow that, not really. He’d probably need to have been a Goa’uld host to follow that, and Louis escaped that particular nightmare, though only narrowly.

“It’s hard to explain. I guess no one’s really ever going to know what it was like. Except you, ‘cos you were like, there for it,” says Zayn.

Louis picks at the label on his beer and debates asking what he really meant to ask, if anything Sobek told him was true, but it’s going to be one of those things where it comes out his mouth and it’s immediately, glaringly obvious that it wasn’t, so he’s not going to humiliate himself by asking. Goa’ulds lie, and they manipulate people. That’s kind of their whole thing.

Zayn said it was him, on Koplides, and Louis still doesn’t know what to do with that, if he believes it.

“Lou,” says Zayn, and Louis knows he’s put everything out there again, without ever saying a word. He’s never actually thought Zayn didn’t know about Louis, and how he feels about him. They spend most of their time together, and Zayn’s not stupid, and Louis has never been good at keeping things beneath the surface like he should.

“You tried to kiss me?” Louis says. “And… I wanted to.” It feels like he’s turning himself inside out, all the embarrassing, needy bits on display. “But you were engaged to Perrie, and you were a Goa’uld, and it was just–”

He’s trying not to say _Weird_.

“I’m not any more, though,” Zayn says. “I’m not either of those. It’s just us.”

He takes the beer bottle out of Louis’ hand and puts it on the table, and takes Louis’ hand in both of his. He’s leaned back against the couch like he has all the time in the world to wait for Louis to sort this out, like he’ll still be here, however long it takes.

“Yeah,” says Louis.

“So it’s okay, if it’s just us?”

“Yeah,” Louis says again.

“Okay,” says Zayn.

“Okay,” Louis repeats.

He’s still not sure he’s ready for it, though he should be, he’s wanted it long enough that he should be ready for it. Zayn tips forward and pulls Louis towards him until they’re close enough that Louis just has to lean in the slightest bit, and then he’s kissing Zayn, soft and tentative and only for a few seconds before he has to stop to marvel at the fact that he’s _kissing Zayn_.

“It’s me, okay?” says Zayn, when Louis pulls. His hand curls around the back of Louis’ neck. “I want this.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” Louis says. He grins.

Zayn gives him a slow smirk. “I want this,” he says, in a voice Louis has never heard him use before – a low, dirty voice. The kiss he follows it up with is dirty too, all tongue and pressing Louis back into the couch, and hands sliding up Louis’ shirt like he has no time to waste.

Louis is a shit soldier, because he can’t actually remember if he’s allowed to do this with Zayn, or if it breaks one of the SGC’s near-infinite number of rules. Not that it’d stop him if it did; not that he doesn’t have a hundred other things he could be focusing on right now. He pulls back to look at Zayn and he thinks about when there was someone else in there with him, and how Louis could tell where he ended and Sobek began. Even when he thought he couldn’t, he could always tell. Zayn’s hair is still green, and it’s messed up from where Louis has been pawing at it, and he smiles at Louis all soft and fond, and Louis thinks he could travel to every planet in the galaxy and he’d never find anything more perfect.


End file.
